Will You Help or Heave Your Underperformers?

You simply can’t tolerate underperformance. Budgets are too tight, margins are too close, and the need for growth is too overwhelming for even the largest organizations to be carrying any dead weight.

For overburdened executives, often the first instinct is to drop underperforming managers. After all, who has the bandwidth to deal with them? “Underperformers take an inordinate amount of energy to manage,” says Jim Bolton, CEO of Ridge Associates, a communications consulting firm. “You not only have to manage their performance, but, as chronic offenders, they become problems in your performance.”

Look before you leap

Firing and replacing key managers is an arduous and time-consuming task. Not only is the separation process fraught with pain and risk, but according to Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), the manager you hire may take six months or more before she produces any value.

Thus many executives don’t confront problem behavior at all, Bolton says, “They find workarounds: they avoid the person, they’re vague in giving feedback, and they often end up with more work to do in trying to compensate for these underperformers. One executive I worked with reorganized his 1,000-person division so he could make an underperformer someone else’s problem,” he says. “But ultimately the choice comes down to fish or cut bait.”

In making that choice, experts say, you owe it to yourself, your organization, and to the manager in question to take at least one shot at diagnosing and addressing the underlying causes of unsatisfactory performance—especially if the employee has shown value in the past. To do so, consider this advice from the experts.

Diagnose and prescribe

Before you can solve the dilemma of an underperforming manager, you need to establish the details of the problem. Begin by carefully evaluating the manager’s results. “What is the manager doing or not doing?” asks John Baldoni, the author of several books on leadership. “Is he making the numbers? If not, why not?” Next, Baldoni says, look at 360-degree results if you have them.

“What are peers, bosses, and employees saying about the manager?” You should also do your own 360, asking key stakeholders and peers about the manager’s performance.

In addition, Baldoni suggests asking the manager to provide his view on why his performance is sub par. “The reasons could vary from lack of support from you (the boss); inadequate resources in people, budget, and time”; to myriad other factors. “The manager may also be facing problems outside the office with spouse, children, or parent care.” Then consider talent/skill fit: “Ask yourself if this manager is in the right position,” Baldoni says. “Does he have the right talent to do the job as well as the skills to perform? Talent you cannot coach; skills you can develop.”

According to Joseph Weintraub, a professor of management at Babson College, performance issues with managers most often “revolve around a common lack of understanding of expectations between managers and their bosses.” One way to diagnose this, he says, is to ask the manager to write down the “three most important things that they get paid to do. Then the manager’s boss would independently do the same exercise for the manager.”

After both have finished the exercise, they would compare results. “In the majority of cases, the lists look dramatically different, with a ‘hit rate’ of about one out of three expectations in common,” Weintraub says. “With this data, the boss and manager can align expectations more clearly to help the manager to focus on doing the ‘right things.'”

Give solutions reasonable time to take

Bolton cautions executives to maintain realistic expectations for a turnaround in performance. “It takes six weeks or longer for people to change behavioral patterns,” he says. If you give a manager an appropriate amount of time and he is still not meeting the expectations you clearly laid out, Bolton says, “you’ll have to decide if their continued performance is worth the price your business pays for the status quo.”

This article appeared in the March 2004 issue of Harvard Management Update.

Partner Center

The email and password entered aren’t matching to our records. Please try again, or reset your password. If you have a username from our previous site, start by using that. Please See our FAQ for more.

If you are signing in for the first time on the new HBR.org but have an existing account, please enter your existing user name and password to migrate your account.Please see Frequently Asked Questions for more information.